The present invention relates generally to management and configuration of tiered storage systems and, more particularly, to methods and apparatus for application and tier configuration management in a dynamic page reallocation storage system in a remote copy environment.
Storage system can use several types of disks including, for example, SSD (Solid State Disk), SAS (Serial Attached) HDD, and SATA (Serial ATA) HDD. These disks are different in performance, capacity, reliability, and cost. When the storage user acquires a storage volume, he chooses from the various types of disks pursuant to the purpose and requirement to maximize the ROI (return on investment). The purpose and requirement may vary with time. In that case, there will be a need to tune the disk configuration for optimization. One approach is to use tiered storage management to maintain a high ROI. Additionally, there may be a need to tune the tiered storage configuration dynamically to keep a maximized ROI.
There are existing technologies for managing a tiered storage environment. For example, US20070055713A1 discloses a volume capacity provisioning method, according to which a storage system selects suitable disks depending on that use and the required performance when a volume requires expanding capacity. US20080184000A1 discloses a thin provisioning (sliced by pages) volume migration method between a plurality of tiers in one pool. A storage system selects a low access volume and seamlessly migrates it to a low ratency tier in another storage module. US20070192560A1 discloses a disk installation controlling method for thin provisioning pool, according to which a storage system installs disks to a suitable pool depending on the system configurations. US20070055713A1 and US20070192560A1 are useful for the tuning of volume tier configuration. US20080184000A1 is useful for capacity installation for a tier. These disclosures are incorporated herein by reference. See also RFC 791 for INTERNET PROTOCOL, RFC 793 for TRANSMISSION CONTROL PROTOCOL, RFC 790 for ASSIGNED NUMBERS, RFC 3720 for Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI), SBC-3 Draft for Draft of SCSI Block Commands (http://www.t10.org), FC-FS-2 Draft for Draft of FIBRE CHANNEL FRAMING AND SIGNALING-2 (http://www.t11.org), and FC-BB-5 Draft for Draft of FIBRE CHANNEL BACKBONE-5 (http://www.t11.org).